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Notes from the Manager

There’s a term coined by Timothy Leary — “set and setting” — in reference to the context in which people take psychoactive drugs: the idea being that the mindset and the setting in which you do the drugs has an effect on your experience of the drugs’ effects. If you’re in a good mindset and a good setting, you’re more likely to have a good trip. If you’re in a bad mindset and/or a bad setting, you’re more likely to have a bad trip.

I believe that this idea is true of movies, too, to an extent: with the right set and setting, nearly any movie-watching experience can be more enjoyable (if not enjoyable, exactly). Comedies are more fun when you’re sitting in an audience that’s enjoying itself. Horror movies are more fun with an audience that’s scared out of its wits. Movies that are “so bad they’re good” can be fun with a group of people sitting around to rip on them with… for some people, anyway. (Me, I can’t get into that shit; I always feel like I could be watching something that was legitimately good instead. Life is too short.) And so on.

My point here isn’t just about an audience, though, but of the projection and the theater, too:

As funny as I think that clip is, I think Lynch is being a bit of a curmudgeon here. I wouldn’t watch a movie on my smartphone, either, yet I have seen and loved a great many movies on my iPad mini and a good pair of headphones, which is high enough resolution that held at a normal distance from my head the screen is actually bigger than my TV. But yeah. A bigger screen is more immersive, which nearly always makes for a better experience. Even if the movie itself isn’t.